1. Field of the Invention
Exemplary embodiments of the present invention relate to a technique for managing vehicle parking using intelligent cameras.
2. Description of Related Art
As parking facilities are increasing in number and becoming bigger and bigger, it is crucial to offer effective and convenient parking service to customers who utilize indoor or outdoor parking lots of, for example, large department stores. In particular, in the case of large parking lots, several parking systems have been introduced and used to enable customers to conveniently park their vehicles. Most of those are services capable of automatically collecting parking fees using a license plate recognition device installed at the entrance of the parking lot, and informing the customer of the number of spots available for parking on every floor by simply calculating the number of vehicles entering and exiting the parking lot.
In order to provide more accurate information about the number of parked vehicles and the parked positions of the vehicles, a detector sensor or video camera is installed on each parking spot. Since the above methods can determine the license plate number of the vehicle parked in each parking spot, it can provide the accurate parked position when the customer's vehicle leaves. The above methods have a problem in that a large number of devices such as sensors and cameras are required in the case of the large parking lot, and thus the maintenance thereof is not easy, which increases costs.
In addition, a method of calculating the number of the vehicles that can be parked in the parking lot using image information only has also been utilized. However, the above method has a problem in that, since it is not possible to recognize the license plate number of the vehicle parked in the parking spot, the information about the position of the vehicle parked in the parking lot is not provided to a customer. As a result, a technique for providing the customer with an accurate parking position of the vehicle using a smaller number of network cameras is needed, in order to reduce maintenance costs.
Korean Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2009-0011871 discloses a technique of effectively providing a driver with a parking position by recognizing a license plate number of a vehicle as an image and varying the transmission speed of data as necessary. However, the above technique has a problem in that a camera must be installed at every parking spot in order to recognize the information about the vehicle parked in the parking spot.